Shaktipat Experiences

I really did not expect anything to happen, but that day I went thru a deep meditation and my right hand started moving involuntarily. I started making mudras (a symbolic or ritual gesture) and my right hand touched specific places around my heart staying there for some time. Each place that was being touched had a different kind of emotional feeling. Some felt like I was having open heart surgery with physical pain, others had deep emotional feelings that brought tears to my eyes.I just let the energy do whatever it was doing. I tried to learn what the energy was doing by watching the movements and mudras, but I was not able to understand the experiences completely. All I know is that at that moment my physical body lost control of itself, a special energy took over, my heart felt like it stopped pumping and I stopped breathing. I experienced bliss, time stopped, and space didn’t exist. —JM 2013

“I felt better, more vibrant and uplifted, than I had in possibly five or more years immediately following shaktipat. Toward the beginning of my very first day of repeating mantras after shaktipat, the energy of my chakras became very clear, real and concrete to me (no longer just a theoretical construct I had read about in books!)–with energy cycling mostly through my lower chakras for awhile, then an energy cyst in the left side of my throat (which I intuitively sensed may have been related to a long term fear of speaking up) released and my body started vibrating faster & faster, with the sensation of my cells becoming more & more spacious, further and further apart, as my crown chakra started to open just a tiny bit at first. As the mantra repetition continued, my crown chakra opened more and more, first to about 2 inches wide, then eventually to what felt like all the way open, to maybe 10 inches in diameter. As the crown chakra opened my physical body felt lighter and lighter, until my sense of a limited self completely disappeared and all that there was left was my Self experiencing an ecstatic vision of the Milky Way in which I savored the delight of experiencing that I was each and every one of the gorgeous, vibrantly luminous planets, stars, and other heavenly bodies for as far as I could see, as well as all the brisk, delightfully invigorating and majestic darkness in between them.” —Leslie Bevington 2013

“I personally experienced a Kundalini Yoga Shaktipat initiation from Shri Anandi Ma, the spiritual heir of Shri Dhyanyogi Madhusudandas, an East Indian saint and renowned Master of Kundalini Maha Yoga born in Bihar, India. Shri Anandi Ma gazed at me while touching my forehead with a peacock feather. The force of the touch of that feather unexpectedly catapulted me backward to the floor, and instantly opened an entirely new state of reality that has continued to flourish to this day.” —Dr. Jill Ammon-Wexler